A Midcentury Bungalow Is Transformed With Glass Walls, Kilims and Caged Light Bulbs

Slide Show | ‘Ranch Burger’ With Special Sauce A midcentury house in Columbia County, N.Y., is remade to order.

Jane Beiles for The New York Times

October 22, 2014

On Location

By ELAINE LOUIE

“My grandmother, Dorothy Hoffman, was an interior designer, and by the time I was 3, I knew a Florence Knoll couch, the Saarinen round table and his Tulip chairs,” said Sloane Klevin, 47. “And I knew Daddy’s chair was an Eames.”

Ms. Klevin didn’t grow up to be a designer herself. She is a partner at Union Editorial, a film advertising, editing and production company in SoHo, and the editor of “Taxi to the Dark Side,” Alex Gibney’s film about American torture practices in Afghanistan, Iraq and Guantánamo Bay, which won an Oscar in 2008 for best documentary feature. But she never lost her interest in midcentury modern design, and eventually amassed an impressive collection of pieces by the likes of Hans Wegner, Isamu Noguchi and George Nelson.

Finding the appropriate setting to show them all off, however, isn’t easy when you live in Manhattan, even if you have a triplex in Harlem, like Ms. Klevin did at the time. But that wasn’t the only reason she wanted a country house.

“I grew up in California,” she said. “I was used to living surrounded by nature. I love New York, but I missed seeing the tiny seasonal changes you see in the country, the things that last only a week or two: wild raspberries, the morel mushrooms, the lilacs.”

In 2006, looking to recapture that experience, she rented part of a farm in Dutchess County, N.Y. That went so well that two years later she tried it again, this time with an 18th-century house, in the nearby town of Stanfordville, N.Y., owned by Douglas Larson, an architect who had renovated it. Ms. Klevin liked the house so much that she tried to buy it, but Mr. Larson and his wife weren’t interested in selling.

So in 2012, she did just that, buying a 1940s bungalow for $260,000. Mr. Larson gutted and renovated it, transforming the dark, small-windowed, 1,400-square-foot space into a bright, 2,100-square-foot house with generous windows. He ripped off the porches and built additions on three sides: one is the new kitchen; another is a covered porch that serves as the main entry; the third contains the master bedroom upstairs and the living room downstairs, where three of the four walls are glass, emphasizing the view of the pond and four acres of rolling meadows.

But, Ms. Klevin said: “If you do an all-modern house, it can feel cold, like a room from Dwell magazine. It’s uncomfortable.”

So she hired Selina van der Geest, a British interior designer with offices in Manhattan and Bangall, N.Y., to add color and texture to the white walls and mostly dark-wood-and-leather furniture. “I asked Selina to make it warm,” she said.

Ms. van der Geest softened the urban palette of white, black and brown with colorful Turkish kilims. She also added a stylistic element that she likes to call “country-industrial”: sliding barn doors in the study and the master bathroom, hand-forged iron hardware on all the interior doors, barn lights (otherwise known as bulbs in metal cages) in the bathrooms and a galvanized tin bucket for a sink in the downstairs powder room.

The renovation, which cost $700,000 (including the interior design), was completed last year. And Ms. Klevin has settled in happily, swimming in the pond in the summer and enjoying the fireplaces in the winter. Her furniture has also settled in well, perhaps better than it might have in the 18th-century house she fell in love with.

In one of the meadows, Harry Bertoia wire chairs surround a fire pit made out of a large Indian metal cookpot. And at Ms. Klevin’s dining table, two Nakashima chairs look as if they have made themselves extra comfortable.

“I stripped them,” Ms. Klevin admitted, “and bleached them white.”

In the eyes of a midcentury-modern purist, that would be blasphemy. But here in the country, somehow it feels right.